Are Wendy Williams’s cries to be freed from her guardianship being heard?
On March 10, the NYPD performed a welfare check on Williams at Coterie Hudson Yards, the assisted living facility where she resides, a police spokesperson confirmed to Yahoo Entertainment. The former TV host, 60, was transported by ambulance “to an area hospital for evaluation.” Leading up to the welfare check, Williams reportedly threw a handwritten note out of the window that read: “Help! Wendy!!”
Williams called into Good Day New York on March 11 to share an update from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She said she underwent a cognitive evaluation and “passed with flying colors.” She said she wanted to be “independently tested” outside of what her guardian, court-appointed attorney Sabrina Morrissey, ordered.
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Also on the call was Ginalisa Monterroso, whom Williams referred to as a “friend” but who is by profession a caregiver, although she is not officially associated with Williams’s care. Monterroso said she’s seeing to it that the independent test results are brought to the judge overseeing Williams’s guardianship. Monterroso said she contacted the NYPD for the wellness check and filed a report with Adult Protective Services.
“Getting out of [this] guardianship … is my No. 1 most important thing,” Williams said.
Morrissey, who has been in charge of Williams’s finances and well-being since 2022, announced publicly in February 2024 that Williams had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. For months, Williams has given interviews denying that she’s cognitively impaired and pleading to be released from the guardianship, which has her living in what she has called a “luxury prison.” It’s a high-end assisted living facility, and she’s in the memory care unit, where she claims the elevators are locked, visitors restricted, she can’t get phone calls and she’s being administered medication that she cannot identify.
Williams told Scotto that she was remaining in the hospital on Tuesday as she waited to have a meeting with her personal attorney and a few other people, whose names she said she would not reveal.
A Williams source told The Sun tabloid that on Monday night, Morrissey tried to have Williams returned to the assisted living facility. However, Williams and her attorney refused, saying that it was not a safe environment for Williams. As a result, Morrissey is expected to file an emergency petition to have Williams moved to less restrictive alternative housing.
The same outlet reported that the Adult Protective Services report was filed because Morrissey approved Williams’s recent trip to Miami for her father’s 94th birthday, but Williams had no money while she was there. A credit card Morrissey reportedly gave Williams was declined and Williams, who was earning an estimated $15 million a year in 2021, had to borrow money from family members.
Morrissey did not respond to Yahoo’s request for comment.
Williams told Scotto that if she were to be freed from the guardianship, she would “of course” agree to having a financial adviser. (It was her ex-financial adviser at Wells Fargo who first set into motion the guardianship by deeming Williams an “incapacitated person” in 2022). Williams, who is in recovery for drug and alcohol addiction, said she would not hire a sober companion because she’s not drinking.
When Scotto asked if it was true that Williams had hired A$AP Rocky’s attorney Joe Tacopina to take on her case, the former TV host said that she is not legally permitted “to bring a [new] attorney on board.”
Williams added that under the guardianship, her money is basically flying out the window.
What will it take to #FreeWendy?
Williams publicly pleading her case for months now is reminiscent of the #FreeBritney movement. In 2021, Britney Spears’s conservatorship (the term for the legal arrangement in Spears’s home state of California) ended after nearly 13 years. Her attorney said that Spears’s father, who acted as conservator, and lawyers made $36 million off the conservatorship.
The health care lawyer Harry Nelson, a partner at Leech Tishman Nelson Hardiman, told Yahoo that the “story of a guardian going overboard” isn’t a new scenario.
“I take these allegations extremely seriously, given that both Wendy and her family members are expressing concern about potentially abusive decision-making by the court-appointed guardian with respect to her freedom of movement and contact,” Nelson said. “We’ve seen this story of a guardian going overboard one too many times. The fact that Wendy is so articulate in expressing that she believes the guardian is mismanaging should demand the highest possible level of scrutiny over the choices being made by the guardian.”
As for why the pleas made by Williams — and by her family members, who have said they’ve been iced out by the conservator, unable to contact her directly and who have started a GoFundMe to #FreeWendy — haven’t been addressed by the court, there are a lot of processes involved.
“My experience is, often, people under guardianship may not understand the process of how to communicate most effectively with the court — which has a busy docket and limited attention to specific guardianships — and may have limited access to counsel to help them communicate their perspectives to the court,” Nelson said.
Further, “Guardians sometimes have an incentive to portray their subjects’ impairment in more severe terms to avoid ambiguity and ensure their power to manage decisions,” said Nelson, who is not involved with Williams’s case.
Morrissey, who’s suing the filmmakers behind Lifetime’s Where Is Wendy Williams? docuseries on Williams’s behalf, alleging they tried to exploit the TV star, described the star as “permanently disabled and incapacitated” in lawsuit documents. In January, Williams said clearly in an interview with The Breakfast Club radio show: I’m “not cognitively impaired.”
“In some cases, it is a matter of lag time from up-to-date psychological evaluations,” Nelson said of delays in guardianship cases. “In others, it is just a matter of the inertia that takes hold as the system is so invested in ‘protecting’ the person from themselves.”
As far as next steps for Williams in trying to end the guardianship, Nelson said it was “valuable” for her to undergo the independent cognitive evaluation at the hospital “to get a fresh perspective from a respected expert” that can be presented to the judge.
Beyond that, a petition to terminate the guardianship should be filed, which would trigger a court hearing “to hear evidence of competency and capacity to manage health care and financial decisions.”
Williams would also probably have to present a plan outlining her support system going forward should she be freed — which she is clearly already considering, as she made clear in her interview with Good Day New York.
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